There has been a lot of doom and gloom recently around Ubisoft's latest multiplayer shooter, XDefiant. After it was reported that the game is struggling to keep player numbers up, the studio has now addressed concerns around the game, stating that XDefiant is “absolutely not dying”.

Ubisoft San Francisco provided an XDefiant roadmap update this week, unveiling plans for Season 2 and beyond. While many are claiming the game is ‘dying', or in some cases, already dead, the developers are pushing back against that idea, saying the “game is doing well” and “absolutely not dying”. However, the team also acknowledges that there are key areas of the game that need improvement, like netcode and hit registration.

For an online shooter, those are two of the worst issues you can have, as it will do nothing but cause frustration amongst players. In a market filled with popular shooters, they'll simply jump over to one of the other massive free-to-play hits. However, the studio says that Ubisoft is in full support of the game at this stage and has allocated additional resources to the team in order to get the game into shape – although this is contradicted by recent layoffs at Ubisoft, which did see some members of Ubisoft San Fransisco let go.

XDefiant launched in May of this year after a string of delays. While the game initially had a lot of hype around it thanks to a successful beta in late 2023, the game has been unable to maintain that popularity at launch. Like any multiplayer game though, there is plenty of time for a bounce-back. Many of us remember the struggles of Rainbow Six Siege in its first years on the market. In fact, it was only Year 2 when R6 Siege developers had to hit pause and launch ‘Operation Health' to fix the game. Since then, Siege has been one of Ubisoft's most popular titles.

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KitGuru Says: Have you played any XDefiant since launch? What do you think the developers need to do to bring players back on board?

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